Next, and Pretty Darn Good

When I moved to Hampden to look after my mother this was the view from my house.  It's the farm where for so many years we all spent so much time together.  My mother and father, Faith and Ray, Phil and me, and Carrie and Jesse.  Before she died, my grandmother was often there, too....and on holidays, Mike, Fran, and Amber.  What a different life.  People started to die, starting with my grandmother, then Ray, then my father, then Faith.  Our happy family (or what we thought was happy) fell apart little by little.  There is a time in life when what has always been erodes.  A new way of being has to be created.

Well, the time I spent in Hampden was, I hope, the worst time of my life.  Only my recent law suit over alimony can compare, though it is certainly a distant second.  So this subject evokes both good and bad, resulting in a stalemate, I guess.  Now it is watercolor on paper.  My attention is on color and value as I work on it.  Can I create a cloudy sky?  Rocks?  Bare trees? Architecture?  No, of course not, but can I arrange paint on a piece of paper so that it makes one think of those things? Yes, but it will be a cloudy sky in someone else's life, a farm where somebody else visited or lived, was happy or sad.

It's interesting that people expect an artist to communicate with them.  Many times even the artist thinks he or she (ooohh, that's hard on my learned version of the English language) is communicating, or even enlightening the viewer.  All anybody can do is look in a mirror.